1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to on-line analytic processing, and particularly to on-line analytic processing that is assisted by faceted searching techniques.
2. Description of Background
Before our invention applications such as on-line analytic processing (OLAP) increasingly required that queries specify predicates on both structured and unstructured data. A popular interface for such queries involves faceted searching techniques. Faceted searching typically identifies an initial set of results through keyword search and thereafter utilizes counts that are computed along a few pre-defined dimensions (“facets”) in order to aid a user in refining her query with additional predicates until a manageable number of rows remain. In contrast, OLAP analysis seeks trends that are determined to be “interesting” and exceptions to the trends by computing aggregates along dimensions rather than narrowing results to just a few rows.